City officials quietly announced Friday afternoon that the bike share program would end March 31.

The $3 million in the city budget intended to fund another bike share program will be reallocated to other projects. The replacement program is no longer in the cards.

“This shift in funding priorities allows us to make critical bicycle and pedestrian improvements—especially for students walking and biking to school," Mayor Ed Murray said in a news release. “While I remain optimistic about the future of bike share in Seattle, today we are focusing on a set of existing projects that will help build a safe, world-class bicycle and pedestrian network.”

The city's Department of Transportation had been in talks late last year with Bewegen, a company that makes electric-assist bicycles, to see about adding a fleet of 1,200 of the bikes by summer this year.

Pronto's performance had been dismal at best, with the city opting to spend $1.4 million last March to buy the then-failing bike share program. Last May, the program counted only 1,800 annual members.

Data released last year indicated that Seattle's hills may have been a factor in the program's lack of popularity. Users rode the bikes downhill far more than uphill, as indicated by the frequency of Pronto shuttles moving bikes from lower-elevation stations to higher ones.

The existing funding will be shifted to an extension of bike lanes on Fourth Avenue, accelerate safe route-to-school projects and build out east-west bike networks, according to the news release.